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Is there no end to the Bushfire Bastards?

By Anthony Cox

I have written
before of the hypocritical attempts to blame the current bushfires with
man-made global warming [AGW]. These people and organisations which do this are
justifiably described as bastards on the basis of Nicola Roxon’s terminology
from the sacking of Rudd and his personal characteristics which Roxon grudgingly
admitted she shared.

The essential characteristic of the bush-fire bastard is a
commitment to the lie of AGW and the shameless use of natural catastrophes to
blame AGW and further whatever ideology or power or financial interest that
bastard has in AGW.

The queue to be part of the bush-fire bastards’ club keeps
growing. A couple of worthy contenders have just raised their hands and either
written or spoken the usual cant made famous by Bandt.

The first is Liam Phelan. Liam is
an archetypal academic success story who has reinforced his proclivities and
beliefs with letters after his name. So much of the ‘discussion’ of AGW is by
declaration or proclamation by the believers on the basis of either their
superior academic expertise or by numbers, the myth and fundamentally
unscientific and disproven
consensus.

Phelan’s recent
article in the Newcastle Morning Herald exhibits another characteristic of
the alarmists; that is the condescending and patronising tone. Phelan’s article
reads as though he is talking to errant children who will respond to a soft but
stern talking to. But his defence of Bandt is atrocious and his basic point is
indefensible. Phelan says this:

There are two key issues in play: the link between
climate change and extreme weather events, and how we as a society should
respond to that link.

This needs to be
stated strongly: bush-fires are not extreme events in Australia and the history
of bush-fires shows the worst bush-fires have been in the past despite the
terrible tragedy of Black Saturday in 2009 in particular. Andrew Bolt has a brief history of Spring bush-fires, as do the Rural Fire Brigade and arguably Australia’s worst bush-fire
is recorded in Summer of 1851, Black Thursday.

What also needs
to strongly stated is that extreme weather events are NOT increasing as Phelan claims.
The Twentieth Century Reanalysis Project shows this. So does the latest IPCC
report, AR5. In its section on extreme weather, SREX, chapter 4, the
IPCC says:

§“There is medium evidence and high agreement that
long-term trends in normalized losses have not been attributed to natural or
anthropogenic climate change”§“The statement about the absence of
trends in impacts attributable to natural or anthropogenic climate change holds
for tropical and extratropical storms and tornados”§“The absence of an attributable
climate change signal in losses also holds for flood losses”

Andrew Bolt has a full list if the IPCC’s admissions about
the lack of extreme weather, including droughts and heat-waves where the prior
IPCC forecasts were not supported by evidence or statistical confidence.

So, what Phelan
is doing when he talks about extreme weather is either lying or demonstrating
his ignorance. For this Phelan is a natural member of the bush-fire bastard’s
club.

The primary
subject of the interview was to tease out Stanley’s expertise about how to
treat young arsonists. Stanley took a generally sympathetic approach to these little bastards. However, Stanley was not satisfied with this and
just had to introduce AGW into the conversation:

With a child it might just
be an accident, you know, it’s fun to watch a fire. You light it and in the
circumstances that we’ve got at the moment with climate change it gets away
when it probably wasn’t meant to get away.

For her sterling
efforts at introducing AGW into a completely different discussion and also
concluding with a pitch for more funding for her research Stanley gets a
membership of the bush-fire bastard’s club.

A final point. Fairfax is already a member of the bush-fire bastard’s club through
the efforts of its flagship papers, the SMH and the Age. Its Newcastle paper
published Phelan’s effort. However the NMH has always been fair-handed and
reasonable in publishing my sceptical articles. For that it misses out on being
a member of the bush-fire bastard’s club.

Sir Henry Fraser has an impressive CV.
Barbados' newest knight, retired university professor, Dr. Henry Fraser, received the Accolade of Knight of St. Andrew, in the 2014 Independence Day Hours. Sir Henry Fraser was named as a result of The Knighthood of St. Andrew being bestowed on him for his outstanding contribution to the medical profession and representation of Barbadian culture, especially in the area of its architectural history.Sir Henry, a medical practitioner by profession, has worked for many years as a lecturer in medicine at the University of the West Indies and now serves as an Independent Senator in the Barbados Parliament where he has gained an outstanding reputation for his work on the historic treasures of Barbados.

He has received a plethora of other awards, including the UWI’s Pelican Award, Paul Harris Fellow of Rotary International and the Gold Crown of Merit (GCM) in the Barbados Honours of 1992.